


Being in love with them is like being in love with the gods, sometimes.

by rhombusbeast



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 09:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15727050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhombusbeast/pseuds/rhombusbeast
Summary: Costis considers his religious affiliation.





	Being in love with them is like being in love with the gods, sometimes.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [getbreqed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/getbreqed/gifts).



It was a lot of work going from a practitioner to a believer.

Costis had only scattered memories of the gods in his childhood. Mostly it was feast days, suffocating summer air sticking in his lungs and sweet bread made by his uncle's wife sticking to his fingers; the dusty stone steps of the temples housing solemn altars with glistening golden tribute prestigiously arranged on bolts of vivid master-crafted textiles; the alcove to the side where the less wealthy made their less ostentatious offerings, where his father had nudged Costis' head down in respect. There he and the others had held out their palms and murmured obligatory words of appeasment, enticing the gods to grant them a bountiful harvest and healthy stock and luck for the year. It had seemed mostly for show, at least to a small Costis' thinking, shielded in the confidence of youth and eager to leave to rejoin the festivities outside. The gods meant pennies on altars and lamb for supper just before winter. Sometimes the harvests boomed, sometimes not.

With his training as a soldier, it had taken merely a shift to devote himself to Miras -- like lowering the sword from fourth position to first. Miras, god of soldiers, for the soldier. An obvious choice. An alignment, a focusing as Costis grew into himself and his career. A negligable portion of his mercenary's pay and a carefully crafted arrow left on a sun-bathed altar; there was rarely the need to commit anything more. At Thegmis, arrows had rained and yet the most cunning to strike him had missed his lungs, he'd been told, by several inches. He'd spent twenty minutes in the physician's battlefield tent and been shooed away.

Whenever he was called to the palace, it was well after midnight. The first time, the face that followed the knock on his door was that of an acne-peppered pageboy who had looked over Costis' shoulder at the spartan soldier's quarters and grimaced, and for that Costis had considered boxing his ears but the pinch about the boy's nose and a redness to his lips echoed a lady in the court whose name Costis didn't know but whose aristocratic airs he did. If the boy was some baron's nephew or cousin, he wouldn't do well to chastise him, so instead Costis had silently followed when the boy snidely announced that this was a summoning, even with no further offered information. The boy had skipped self-importantly ahead and didn't bother to reveal where he was leading them but Costis had walked from the barracks to the king's rooms enough times, even by that point, that it was like tracing the path of his own heart. His stomach had unsettled, and what hadn't helped his nerves at all were the eyes of the king's guard locked on him as they entered the antechamber. There'd been pity in them, though none looked away.

Staged in front of the doors had been an older woman Costis had taken a moment to recognize as one of the queen's attendents. In the wavering light of the wall-mounted torches, shadows pooled in the creases framing her eyes and thin lips, and rather than annoyed or disturbed at having to be up so late, she'd had the same look of hidden amusement that Costis had thought - once - he had seen on the queen. She'd looked Costis up and down and suddenly he felt naked, though he'd been given the time to dress and put on his armor and look suitable for audience with the king, even, apparently, at this time of night. In later nights, she would simply smile at him, and Costis would feel no less vulnerable and he wondered, sometimes, about what sacrificial lambs felt to be lead to the altar.

It was a lot of work going from a believer to a disciple. He'd seen his goatfoot king, drunk off his ass, step off a roof and not fall to his death. He'd seen the house of Erondites fall.

There were no candles in the king's bedroom and so it was dark, save for a singular uncurtained window, which was how Costis saw the queen first, tucked in regal repose in a plush, high-backed chair angled just barely towards the king's canopied bed. The moonlight, insistantly knocking as it was on the objects that fell within its sliced purview through the window, melted in contact with her pale skin; it stretched and purred and soaked into the smooth curve of her cheekbones and elegant hands, so that she was not so much painted white by the light as she seemed glowing from within, queen and sovereign of everything that touched her. Costis would not remember later whether she hadn't taken down her hair, or if he merely recalled so later, if her deific reflection was so core to his concept of her that his mind amended any discrepancy.

The queen merely looked over Costis as she might consider a beetle just a little too pretty to squash and then turned to peer across the width of the window, just beyond the moonlight's greedy grasp. Costis squinted against the darkness, wherein he could make out the uneven shape of the king.

Where Attolia was ethereal, Attolis was wild and earthy. His hook was gone, and his bedclothes rumpled and askew, his neckline pulled aside like he'd been tugging it. His hair flew away from his face in impetuous strands. Where the queen collected, the king effused, but just what he emanated, Costis couldn't quite name. There was something about the way he stood, pressed against the wall, his good hand idly massaging his maimed wrist, that made him look foreign - Eddisian. The queen fashioned herself after one of the old gods Attolia had forgotten; the king was one.

The queen murmured something that Costis, feeling distant from himself in the dark in the king's room, didn't catch, but the light was just enough that he saw the king smile in reply. He knelt at the queen's knee and kissed her hand -- the pair of them looking posed together like a classical statue -- and he replied, "Of course he does, darling." Then he turned to Costis, who had thought before already that he would walk into hell for his queen and king.

That was before the king smiled at him with the same look he'd just given his wife.

 

There was not much work in going from a disciple to a devotee.

**Author's Note:**

> This was pretty much my first foray into writing for this fandom, so I hope you like it! I had a lot of fun trying to figure out how words work.


End file.
